1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to slave devices on a communication bus and more particularly to slave modules on an I2C bus.
2. Description of the Related Art
I2C (also known as I2C) is an inter-device communication standard. An I2C bus has one master device and one or more slave devices. Each slave device has a unique communication address so that the master device can direct communication to a particular slave device.
Printers have user-replaceable supply items such as toner bottles. These supply items may have authentication circuits to distinguish original equipment manufactured toner bottles from third-party toner bottles, since different operating procedures may apply. Authentication circuits may implement cryptography algorithms to increase confidence in the authentication. A single color printer, such as a mono printer, may have an authentication circuit on a toner bottle and another authentication circuit on an imaging unit. These modules that contain the authentication circuits may be nearly identical, the only difference being a non-volatile memory variable that contains the module address. During manufacturing, extra expense must be expended to keep track of these two similar, but non-identical, modules, and the system will not operate correctly if the modules are mixed up. What is needed is a way to use identical modules on multiple supply items.